Todd looked Faith up and down, slowly—the way you'd look at something stuck to your shoe. "This is a restricted aerospace facility, Neil. Not a community outreach program."
He said it loud enough for the room. A few mechanics chuckled.
Faith said nothing. She walked past Todd straight to the open engine nacelle. She leaned in. She listened to the residual tick of cooling metal. She smelled the exhaust residue. She ran one finger along the fuel line. Then she turned to Neil and said one sentence: one technical observation about the fuel manifold pressure behavior that made Neil go completely still.
Todd overheard it. "Where'd you read that? Off a cereal box?"
More laughter, louder this time. Faith didn't respond. She just looked at Neil. And Neil looked back at her with an expression Todd had never seen on his face before: it was the look of a man who just realized the answer had been standing outside the fence for six weeks.
"Come back tomorrow," Neil said quietly. "I'll get you proper clearance."
Todd watched them walk away. His smirk was gone. Something had just shifted in Hangar 3. He could feel it, and he didn't like it one bit.
What Faith saw in 30 seconds, what she heard in the engine's cooling tick, was something 50 trained mechanics and $8 million in diagnostics had completely missed. And she was about to prove it.
To understand what Faith Brooks heard in that engine, you have to understand where her ears were trained.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana: a one-room repair shop on the corner of a street most people drove past without noticing. The sign out front read Brooks Engine Works in hand-painted letters that had faded twice and been repainted three times.
That shop belonged to Elton Brooks, Faith's grandfather. Elton was a Korean War veteran, served two years as a field mechanic in some of the worst conditions the military could offer: freezing temperatures, no spare parts, engines that had to run or men would die. He learned to fix things with whatever he had: wire, tape, a prayer, and two hands that never shook. When he came home, nobody gave him a parade. No one offered him a job. He was a black man in Louisiana in the 1950s.